teachNbabble

Video export from Voicethread to Viddler to Vodpod and embedded into a wordpress page. Kind of a cool way to display kids work. The embedded voicethread looks better than the videos but I need to make room on my ed.voicethread account for next semester. (Video Wall)

Any of the tools I have had the students use this year, Imovie, gdocs, a blog, a wiki, word could have been used to allow students to reflect on the process they went through to complete their projects. As I have mentioned, however, this semester I thought I would concentrate on using Voicethread as a tool that students could use for the purpose of reflection.

So after I am done with a number of projects what have I learned:

• I have a number of talented students
• they were willing to try something new and able to live with some of the frustrations we had with the network
• our network here is still causing problems with the uploading of images and audio.
• I need to get a more frequent analysis of what was done
  • this could be through a blog post or perhaps a quick screenshot and an audio post to voicethread
• need to get a broader range of analysis
  • add reflection prompts (Students might be asked to record thoughts, observations, feelings, activities, and questions in a written journal that is maintained throughout the project period.(Reflective Assessment)
• more clearly define expectations

Will try this again next year however, he are a few samples.

Another Sketch by Nick

Ketki’s Photoshop Project
Students were asked to pick a band and an album then analyze the album lyrics and try to discover a central theme. From this analysis they were asked to create a cd cover that incorporated the theme they found into the cover design.

Have used Furl for a number of years as my social bookmarking site. I liked the way you could create a MLA bibliography from your bookmarks and keep a copy of the bookmarked website on your account. I stopped using it a while ago due to the number of inappropriate links I was finding in the Most Popular Links page.

I exported all of my links to an HTML file deleted many of the links, then started using Zotero more and more. I have not found anything that comes close to Zotero to help with information management . It keeps a local copy of the website and allows you to markup and annotate that copy. It is, however, machine resident and does not allow for social bookmarking. When you have a lab with individual accounts this works fine but if the students are using one account then the Zotero bookmarked information could become a mixture of multiple students work dealing with unrelated topics (this could be circumvented with proper collection management and tagging).

I had also been looking at Diigo. I had been signed up with Diigo for a while but started looking at in more closely when I saw how you could create slideshow from a list of bookmarked sites (this Diigo slideshow for my students is an example) The one thing I noticed about Diigo is that it might be a one stop center for creating bookmarks. One click saves the bookmark to diigo, furl and Del.icio.ous.

As I started looking at this even more I started wondering if diigo might be used to help with grading student blogsites as you can comment on different parts of an online document. This Voicethread explains what I mean. By the way is it Diego or Deego or what?

Starting to like Voicethread as a reflective assessment tool. Have the student go through a process then use Voicethread to describe and reflect on what they learn. As I get better at this I am hoping I will get them to take more time to add more depth to there reflection. Sounds like I need to construct a rubric at our exciting rubric PD session on Thursday. Here is an initial sample from Nick. It will be interesting to see how this will work for the student’s CD cover assignment as well.

The Thinking Stick has been in charge of my PD this week. Looking at the way they are organizing themselves with respects to technology made me look at how we plan to structure our Tech Team. Mixing their terminology with ours then adding the two graphics to a Google presentation so as a Tech Team we could examine and collaborate on our structure will help us better understand how we might more effectively divide responsibilities.

The next day my reader pulled down another Thinking Stick gem, When it all goes Right featuring a Voice Thread from an IB art class. What a great way to display student art. Have them post the graphic then discuss where the ideas came from and how they created the piece. I thought it was impressive, as did the kids and the art teacher I quickly showed the thread to later!